Fractum
Safe and Flexible Metal Recycling Made Simple

The emerging automotive and construction industries are propelling the demand for metals to be used in manufacturing parts and residential buildings. However, the scarcity of earth metals and the high cost of mining are pushing the scrap recycling market to meet this concurrent demand for raw materials. Similarly, rising concerns pertaining to greenhouse gas emissions and deteriorating urban air quality are driving up demand for efficient metal recycling. And distinct sustainability goals such as metal recycling pollution reduction, energy conservation, and the conservation of valuable raw materials are critical to meeting global environmental requirements. Although metal recycling is good for the environment, the process of crushing the scrap metal, which is the first step towards recycling, can be dangerous to both the operator and the environment. Traditional methods that use drop balls and oxy cutting are disregarded in the industry since they are dangerous to operators, harmful to the environment, and, to top it all off, require a large investment. At this juncture, providing a safe, flexible, and agile solution in the form of an impact breaker that is comparatively cheaper and reliable to crush scrap metals is Fractum.

Fractum’s impact breakers can recycle slag, moulds, and steel scrap, as well as remove skulls and break down pig iron and tundish. The impact breakers are notable for their ability to move across scrapyards themselves rather than transporting tonnes of scrap piles to the location of the crusher, enabling clients to move quickly from one job to the next without having to transportheavy materials to the drop ball or oxy cutting machinery.

As a result, when working with Fractum’s impact breakage solutions, tasks such as slag crushing, iron breaking, and de-skulling require less heavy machinery. The flexibility and breaking capacity of the impact breaker translate to lower transportation and other operational costs, as well as increased production capacity and productivity.“Our impact breaker is very safe; you can take the breaker to the location the material is and process it on the site,” states Thorkild Stokholm, managing director of Fractum.

“When a customer comes to me and wants to buy our machine, we install it, commission it, and provide the necessary training for the operators and the customer’s engineers wherever they are on the planet,” states Thorkild.

An example of Fractum’s impact breaker’s efficiency is how it was utilized by a steelwork manufacturer to increase their smelting capability. The client had three 255 tonne converters, that could produce 255 tonnes of steel per charge; but, if the scrap steel smelted in the converters was processed down to 500-600 millimeters before smelting, they could increase their productivity by one charge per 24-hours. After implementing Fractum’s machine, the client was able to smelt one extra round of steel per 24-hours. This comes out to more than 700 tonnes of steel in increased capacity per day distributed on the 3 converters due to the smaller size on the scrap steel before smelting. Another intriguing scenario involved a scrap dealer in Germany using the Fractum machine to process and crush punching tools from a car manufacturer. The car manufacturer was extremely concerned about how these critical manufacturing components were being scrapped, simply due to intellectual property issues. The Fractum machine provided a safe and reliable solution to the challenge which could be done on site, close to the manufacturer.

Moreover, the impact breakers are also helpful for many small scale contractors, as they do not possess the capital to acquire the expensive drop balls to process scraps. “A new drop ball will cost around $2 million to commence operations. And, because it is so difficult to begin working with scrap, the capital expenditure frequently becomes a major factor for dealers,” states Thorkild. The impact breakers are much cheaper and more efficient when compared to the alternatives, thereby enabling small dealers to initiate the scraping process seamlessly. Adding to its capabilities, Fractum is on a mission to eliminate the dangerous and polluting recycling processes like Oxy Cutting, and drop ball. Thus making way for environmentally sustainable scrap yard technologies to emerge whilst ensuring that clients’ processes are safer and more efficient.